For those of you not familiar with Nonko, or the allegations surrounding the company, TradingSchools.org began receiving a series of insider leaks during early months of 2015. The leaks and allegations were that the “Prop Trading Firm” known as Nonko Trading was an illegal stock trading scheme. In short, Nonko was accepting client funds and then allowing customers to trade from a platform which appeared to be a live, real-time trading environment. But was nothing more than a trading simulator.

Customers never knew that they were essentially playing an online video game. And since most newbie day traders lose money, the company simply allowed paying customers to lose “play money”.

Red Flags

From 2014 through the summer of 2015, multiple individuals began contacting TradingSchools.org complaining that winning trades executed at Nonko were mysteriously disappearing from their daily account statements. For instance, a customer would buy XYZ stock in the morning and then close out the trade in the evening for a several thousand dollar profit, only to discover that the profitable trade would later “disappear.”

One individual, in particular, submitted a screen shot showing a winning trade of $26,000, which later was deleted from his account statement. No reason was given, other than there was a “technical glitch” in the system. As you can imagine, he was furious and didn’t know where to turn for help. As a result of this conversation, and several other similar conversations, TradingSchools.org began writing about the situation during the spring of 2015 in a blog post titled, Nonko Trading: Real Or Not?

The original blog post triggered a series of events which can only be described as “The Shit Hitting The Fan.” Nonko denied all allegations and began an aggressive social media campaign to discredit and attack anyone that questioned the authenticity of the company.

The Nonko Review

On June 20, 2015, TradingSchools.org published a final review of Nonko Trading. In the review, we detailed all of the evidence that we had collected during the prior 6 months. We recommended that all individuals that currently had funds deposited with the company, to immediately request a withdrawal. And to submit a complaint to the SEC.

As you can imagine, this set off yet another “shit storm” and Nonko Trading began aggressively attacking TradingSchools.org. From June 22 through July 10, the website TradingSchools.org was hit with a devastating series of hacks. Someone had hired a hacker to find a security loophole and completely wipe out TradingSchools.org.

Over an 18 day period, the TradingSchools.org website had to be re-uploaded onto multiple web servers in an attempt keep the content alive.

After the security loophole was finally discovered and closed. Nonko Trading once again attacked with a series of aggressive DDOS attacks. For those of you not aware, a DDOS attack is an attack where an army of “slave computers” bombard a website with requests. The result is that the website bogs down and legitimate users cannot view content.

Finally, are mitigating the hacks and the DDOS attacks, TradingSchools.org was able to keep the review alive and viewable to the public. The end result is that the review quickly spread through social media. The cat was out of the proverbial bag. The turd was moving through the drain pipe.

Those individuals that were quick enough to take our advice and pull their money out were very lucky. However, most simply did not want to believe the review. Most kept their money on deposit. They were talked out of leaving. Big mistake.

Nonko Disappears

On about July 15, 2015, the Nonko Trading website disappeared. And with it, all investor funds. They simply vanished. The burden of keeping the fraud alive become too heavy. Once the allegations entered into the bloodstream of social media, the scheme quickly imploded.

As you can imagine, TradingSchools.org began receiving a tidal wave of complaints. All we could say…we told you so.

The Haters

Not everyone was happy that TradingSchools.org exposed Nonko. Especially the “Trading Educators.”

The big question that readers should be asking is, “How did Nonko become so popular?” Look no further than various trading educators running online stock trading chat rooms. Let me explain how the scheme worked…

Suppose that you are a newbie trader, and you discover an amazing, live day-trading room. The moderator of the live trading room is supposedly making thousands of dollars each day with his magical trading indicators and is selling an awesome day trading mentorship. The cost of the mentorship is $3995 and the day trading room is $129 per month. Most newbie traders don’t have much money. But the trading room educator convinces the newbie to max out his credit cards to purchase the mentor program, and then open a day trading account with the “recommended prop firm”.

The “recommended prop firm” accepts deposits for as little as $2,500. Which is just about everything the newbie trader has available. The “recommended prop firm” known as Nonko tells the newbie trader that he has a daily purchasing power of $50,000 in which to day trade.

The newbie trader is now convinced that he has access to $50,000 in trading capital. The newbie trader can hardly believe his good luck. Someone is giving him $50,000 to trade. And now, all he has to do is follow the trades of the live trading room educator. Easy street is just around the corner. Easy money, hot models, fast sports cars, vacations to exotics destinations, expensive clothes and gold watches, its all there for the taking. And the best part is that this amazing day trading business can be operated from the convenience of a laptop. Example A and Example B.

But what the newbie trader does not realize is that everyone is on the scam, and he is the target. The day trading educator earns a commission from every trade that the newbie trader makes. The prop trading firm, Nonko knows that the day trading educator is also a scam. He knows that if a person shadow trades with the day trading educator, then they are destined to lose. This is how the scam worked. And it worked well. While it lasted.

Where Are They Now?

I love those “where are they now TV shows”. Surely you know what I am talking about. The child TV star that eventually became a crack smoking homeless person. Or the cute little daughter in the sitcom that eventually became a porn actress. The same is true with the Nonko Trading Scam. Lets take a look…

Naris “Chucky” Chamroonrat, the owner of Nonko is currently sitting in LA County jail. What an excellent way to spend Christmas. His mother must be so proud.

Adam Plumer, the partner of “Chucky” is also probably awaiting a criminal indictment and will also be heading to a Federal Prison near you. But in the meantime, he is currently selling some magic bullshit trading indicators and trading systems at TradeStation. Have a look, pretty funny. The scammer is selling yet another trading scam.

Most of the trading educators pushing Nonko, that were running bullshit trading rooms are long gone. (or waiting to be indicted, stay tuned)

What happened to Nonko?

This is the funniest part of the whole story. A short time after Nonko closed up and disappeared, they rebranded their bullshit video game, stock trading platform and renamed it Logix Trader.

Logix Trader? WTF? Yep, its true. Instead of justing lying to people about having a real trading account, they adopted a model where people can pay a monthly fee and trade from a simulator.

Of course, the simulator is also heavily promoted by yet more “trading educators” that earn an affiliate commission for each subscriber. And guess who is the largest and most prominent promoter of the Nonko/Logix trading simulator? None other than Ross Cameron of Warrior Trading. Which of course is deliciously ironic.

Wrapping Things Up

The Nonko story is not over. Not even close. There will be more indictments and arrests, more SEC filings down the line. There are more players involved. And I won’t say any more than that. Those involved know that “Chucky” just got arrested this morning. And he will be singing like a bird, and cooperating with the US Attorney and the FBI. In a desperate, mad scramble for a reduced prison sentence.

Yep, will be sentenced shortly. And they issued arrest warrants for Yaniv and Ran. Though it’s nearly impossible to extradite Israeli citizens out of Israel. I would expect those two to be hunkered down in Tel Aviv.

It is obvious to me that there were crimes committed here and they will get what they deserve. I still have a hard time understanding the legal process when chat rooms front run hundreds of paying customers in low float socks and still operate destroying the retail public’s finances. They almost seem to get bigger and market more over the last 2 years. There must be some awareness in legal circles about the blatant fraud that these rooms are committing and there must be some officials looking to take them down. TS has described the legal process very well, but… Read more »

Props to tradingschools for sticking to its mission informing the retailers newb and veteran. Glad it survived the malicious hacking attempts to destroy the site. Only the scamsters who are making it big from exploiting the monthly churn of new generations of distressed middle class newbs every m0nth could afford and resort to hiring hackers or web history cleanup such as WT did with their architectural & dummy spreadsheet fibbing smear on archive.org. TS must be a boon and motifvational factor for the authorities. I hope Adams is also stopped at LAX as he tries to flee charges of scammed… Read more »

Prop model is to get “suckers” to risk deposit funds and/or buy educational program. The lure is huge trading capital available 10x or 20x the deposit. However, the risk parameters are extremely tight and with huge margins at play soon 99% of the “suckers” lose their deposit via stop outs. Prop firm has sold educational program, plus made money on commissions by the time “sucker” is out the door in few weeks at most. This Nonko went few steps further by creating a “fake i.e. virtual” dimension of simulated data. This is a first in the industry it seems. SEC… Read more »

Actually, what the did was essentially set up a quasi CFD trading platform using real data via use of a sim trading account. Kind of like Meir Barak’s Tradenet with Colmex Pro platform (all over Youtube). But yes, its all smoke and mirrors

Good for you Emmett for helping to expose these pricks! You have made my day. It delights me to know that at least one more of these criminals are in jail. I wish the sec would put you on their payroll to bust more of these frauds.

The sim isnt that great but it is inexpensive. 69/mo to try out day trading strategy. One more thing: there is a daily blotter where you can other traders daily and monthly performance, can’t be more than 40 or so accounts so Logix claim that they have hundreds of traders is suspect….

For crying out loud!! We were just discusing logixtrader today under the prop firms section of this site!! I am not part of some affiliate marketing, just a guy who blew up his account and wanted a real-time sim. Pretty wild!